Supreme Court allows Texas to use voter ID law (Under the cover of darkness)

The Supreme Court in a pre-dawn order Saturday said Texas could proceed with its strict voter ID law in next month’s election, despite a lower court’s ruling that it was unconstitutional.

The court gave no reasoning for its decision, but Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

“The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters,” Ginsburg wrote.

An appeals court had said it was too close to the election to stop what has been described as the nation’s strictest photo ID law.

But Ginsburg said the court had shirked its duty, since a district court after a full trial had said the law was written with discriminatory intent and could keep an estimated 600,000 registered voters from casting ballots.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/2014/10/18/0439b116-5623-11e4-892e-602188e70e9c_story.html?wpisrc=al_national